Hi Lila,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 4: I have an interest I’m actively pursuing, voluntarily devoting more than 3 hours of “free time” each week .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were universalism, stimulation, and self-direction.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was openness.
You said your top three talents were verbal, social, and musical.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you were not sure yet about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to put on a cappella show .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Communicate with my landlord about the lease .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said I will feel assured .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Nervous to mess up .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I finish eating dinner, then I will call my dad .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Spanish .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Small when receiving critical feedback, and Small when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being balancing everything .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .
In one word, you said it made you feel Giddy .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
| |
| "I'm a hardworking person, and I want to be in love with something!" |
| "The best thing to do is try stuff" |
| Short interventions that help people clarify and affirm their values can have a big impact on achievement |
| Spend time thinking about "career C" |
| When what you do aligns with your goals, even the "tedious" tasks, everything goes more smoothly. |
| Just WOOP it |
| Deliberate practice is the most effective form of practice. To practice deliberately, set a specific stretch goal, approach it with 100% focus, and seek immediate feedback, ideally from a coach. |
| Ask for, and give advice. Don't disregard emotions/motivation. |
| Our mindsets influence the thoughts we have in response to a situation, and in turn, influence our response. We can change these mindsets, especially if we teach them to others. |
| MODIFY YOUR SITUATION! DON'T RELY ON "NIGHT GUY"'s DECISIONMAKING CAPABILITIES |
| Seek a mentor - for information and inspiration |
| Go beyond yourself, have a self transcendent purpose, make giving a habit (5 min favors) |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Claire Sun |
| Dear Lila,
I appreciate your enthusiasm and vulnerability so, so much. Your energy for every class inspired and challenged me to match your energy and devote more of myself to Grit Lab. You were always relentlessly honest and open in what you shared with our team, from your successes to your fears. Your purposeful goals to get closer to your roommates made me think about how to become closer to my own, and I really thank you for that.
I admire how you changed everything in the middle of the semester to pursue comics, something you truly cared about and were interested in. Your discovery presentation was a standout moment, truly, and I wish I didn’t have to hold it up for you so I could’ve experienced it in its true form. You made an actual comic!! So cool!! Your creativity and ingenuity shined, and I love that you went out of the box. Your five minutes were deeply engaging and also informative, a hard balance to strike.
|
| Melissa Murin |
| I appreciated the honesty and openness that you brought and facilitated within our group. You are a very persistent, proactive individual, which was really apparent in our group activities and in your discovery project. You were often the first to begin our discussions and the first to offer possibilities for our group pre-class activities. You’ve grown a lot over the course of this past semester, especially socially - when we met you were much more shy, and it has been lovely seeing you open up to all of us and start to cold-email more professors for your project. It was really wonderful getting to know you, and I hope that our friendship lasts beyond the class!
I loved your discovery project and the hands-on demonstration of your comic writing. I also struggle with just starting, and I appreciated your candor on what made you so hesitant to just start making comics. I think the perception that we have to learn as much as we can before we start down a new path is a very Penn take on new hobbies. Fear of the failures that come with learning along the way is so difficult, and the advice that you shared regarding distancing yourself from your work, in your case - through drawing yourself as a carrot, is helpful in alleviating that fear. I also loved your quote “write with a closed door, edit with an open door,” which harkens back to the advice to just start trying out a new skill! |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.